Femme futures

by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Where does the future live in your body?
Touch it

1

Sri Lankan radical women never come alone.
We have a tradition of coming in groups of three or four.
The Thiranagama sisters may be the most beloved and famous,
but in the 20s my appamma and great aunties were the Wild Alvis Girls.
Then there is your sister, your cousin, your great-aunts
everyone infamous and unknown.
We come in packs          we argue
we sneak each other out of the house
we have passionate agreements and disagreements
we love each other very much but can’t stand to be in the same room or continent for years.
We do things like, oh, start the first rape crisis center in Jaffna in a war zone in someone’s living room.
When war forces our hands,
we all move to Australia or London or Thunder Bay together
or, if the border do not love us, we are what keeps Skype in business
When one or more of us is murdered
by the State or a husband
we survive
whether we want to or not.

I am an only child
I may not have been born into siblinghood
but I went out and found mine.
Made mine.

We come in packs
even when we are alone

Sometimes the only ancestral sisterlove waiting for you
is people in books, dreams
aunties you made up
people who are waiting for you in the clouds ten years in the future
and when you get there
you make your pack
and you send that love
back

2.

When the newly disabled come
they come bearing terror and desperate. Everyone else has left them
to drown on the titanic. They don’t know there is anybody
but the abled. They come asking for knowledge
that is common to me as breath, and exotic to them as, well,
being disabled and unashamed.
They ask about steroids and sleep. About asking for help.
About how they will ever possibly convince their friends and family
they are not lazy or useless.
I am generous- we crips always are.
They were me.
They don’t know if they can call themselves that,
they would never use that word, but they see me calling myself that,
ie, disabled, and the lens is blurring, maybe there is another world they have never seen
where crips limp slowly, laugh, have shitty and good days
recalibrate the world to our bodies instead of sprinting trying to keep up
Make everyone slow down to keep pace with us.

Sometimes when I am about to email the resource list,
the interpreter phone numbers, the hot chronic pain tips, the best place to rent a ramp,
my top five favorite medical cannabis strains, my extra dermal lidocaine patch—it’s about
to expire, but don’t worry, it’s still good,
I want to slip in a PS that says,
remember back when I was a crip
and you weren’t, how I had a flare and had to cancel our day trip
and when I told you, you looked confused
and all you knew how to say was, Boooooooooo!
as I was lying on the ground, trying to breathe?
Do you even remember that?
Do your friends say that to you, now?
Do you want to come join us, on the other side?
Is there a free future in this femme of color disabled body?

3.

When I hear my femme say When I’m old and am riding a motorcycle with white hair down my back
When I hear my femme say When I’m old and sex work paid off my house and my retirement
When I hear my femme/myself say When I get dementia and I am held with respect when I am between all worlds
When I see my femme packing it all in because crip years are like dog years and you never know when they’re going to shoot Old Yeller
When I hear my femme say when I quit my teaching gig and never have to deal with white male academic nonsense again

When I hear us plan the wheelchair accessible femme of color trailer park,
the land we already have a plan to pay the taxes on
See the money in the bank and the ways we grip our thighs back to ourselves

When I hear us dream our futures,
believe we will make it to one,
We will make one.

The future lives in our bodies

Originally published in Hematopoiesis Press, Issue 2. Copyright © 2017 by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha.

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.

Hematology

by sam sax

while he lives

here’s a list

of images

light in a filthy glass

pigeon dead on the high spiked window

clear plastic bag above him full of water if water could kill everything that lives in you & it can — 

i sit in a corner of the cancer ward

fingering the app that shows me

other faggots in this hospital

chat with one

i might meet in radiology

but don’t       instead

make the sick man laugh

while he’s conscious

compliment his gown

his new brutal cheekbones

that appeared with the chemo

if only it were simple as a magnet

sucking the bad metals out of him

if only i could make a better list

more magic      less language

periphrastic & restorative

if only i met that stranger

in the basement

& our pleasure rose

through the hospital

bliss poultice

for the sorrow-skinned who sit

half-conscious & half-machinery

while the sick man lives

all i can do is recount

the vast pastoral of his illness

when he is gone i’m counting

on all the good flooding back

his beard

a collapsed country

i’ll refuge inside

his laugh

a memory

so liquid

i’ll hear it

when anyone

opens a window

to scare the birds

Source: Poetry (June 2016)

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.

Smell Is the Last Memory to Go

by Fatimah Asghar

on my block, a gate
on my block, a tree smelling

of citrus & jasmine that knocks
me back into the arms of my dead

mother. i ask Ross how can a tree
be both jasmine & orange, on my block

my neighbors put up gates & stare
don’t like to share, on my block

a tree I can’t see, but can smell
a tree that can’t be both but is

on my block, my mother’s skirt twirls
& all i smell is her ghost, perfume

on my block, a fallen orange
smashed into sidewalk

its blood pulped on asphalt on my
block, Jordan hands me a jasmine

by the time i get home
all its petals are gone

Source: Poetry (April 2019)

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.

Separation, Parts

by Dani Janae

for Sarah

I’LL NAME MY DAUGHTER ZARA—
an ode to you as force going
vastly in every direction.
I speak to become a child
in the early stages
of recognizing her own voice:

teach me how to braid my hair.
Teach me how a name hangs on
like a gummy tooth. Descent.
All these years of my life.

I want you to hold me
so that I don’t burst
— a collapsing star.

          descent cloaking itself
           in the same dark
           as departure.

I don’t want to grow old
never knowing how you
called me. Teach me how
a name fissures
and fractures
like a gummy tooth.

My primitive devotion turns
tongue into bedrock, and I try
to conjure you from the well
of my chest. I discovered
my own hands too late to never
let you go; both of us now lying
in the absence between
longing and belonging.

You were an isle, then you weren’t.

Oh, to be yours
for one second.

The ecosystem
of the mouth tells everything.

I ask the hollow ground about being born
and she tells me it’s too great, too heavy.

Source: Slush Pile Magazine, Issue 23.

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.

Explorer

by Kazim Ali

I fear dispersal but the resounding really sounds may be full of echo
or echolocation for the next round

Eye rowed in the guest book of God my many sacred tongues
body and bow

Fingers spell now all the spaces I open
You now verse now open oh pen

Cacti quiver for a century
In the desert I swam myself earthword to know

No time on earth and no breath no dearth
Hollowed out into architecture eternal

Who argues with rhyme or snow
Who knows the space in your here

The space in the storm so finely bowed
The space in snow no one nears

Originally published in Poetry (March 2019)

Most Poetry will post a poem by a LGBTQ+ poet, selected by our members, each day through the month of August.